Related resources for this article

Introduction

Julian Wasser

AP/REX/Shutterstock.com

(1929–68). Martin Luther King, Jr., was an American Baptist minister and social activist. Inspired by the belief that love and peaceful protest could eliminate social injustice, he led the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. King organized mass protests against racial discrimination and spoke out against poverty and war. A champion of nonviolent resistance to oppression, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

King’s leadership was a key factor in the success of the civil rights movement. Before the movement, it was legal and common for African Americans in the South and other parts of the United States to be banned from using the same public facilities as whites. Blacks in those areas generally could not go to the same schools, restaurants, or public bathrooms as whites, for example. On buses and trains, they could ride only in certain sections. King led many protests against such forced racial separation, or segregation. One of the major achievements of the civil rights movement was making segregation illegal. Another was the passage of new laws prohibiting discrimination.

Early Life

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929. His father, Martin, Sr., was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, a black congregation. His mother, Alberta Williams King, was a schoolteacher. Martin had an older sister, Christine, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel.

King encountered racism at an early age. When he was six, his friendship with two white playmates was cut short by their parents. King never forgot this incident.

A bright student, King was admitted to Morehouse College at age 15, without having completed high school. Before beginning college, however, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut. He was shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. He wrote to his parents about how blacks and whites attended the same churches and restaurants, noting “I never [thought] that a person of my race could eat anywhere.” This experience deepened King’s growing hatred of racial segregation.

King decided to become a minister and at age 18 was ordained in his father’s church. After graduating from Morehouse in 1948, he entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. Renowned for his public speaking skills, King was elected president of Crozer’s student body, which was composed almost entirely of white students. He was the valedictorian of his class in 1951 and won a graduate fellowship. At Boston University he received a Ph.D. in theology in 1955.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ62-116775)

In Boston, King met Coretta Scott. They were married in 1953 and had four children: Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott, and Bernice Albertine.

Civil Rights Efforts

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

King had been impressed by the teachings of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi on nonviolent resistance. King wrote, “I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.” He became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

In December 1955 King was chosen to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, formed by the black community to lead a boycott of the segregated city buses. The boycott came about after a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. That action was against local law, and Parks was arrested. In response, King led the Montgomery bus boycott. During the boycott, people protested against segregation by refusing to ride the city buses. The campaign lasted more than a year. During that time King’s home was bombed. Nevertheless, he persuaded his followers to remain nonviolent despite threats to their lives and property. Late in 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. As a result, the buses were desegregated.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

In 1957 King and other activists, notably Bayard Rustin, established a group later known as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It was formed to help local organizations carry out civil rights activities in the South. As leader of the SCLC, King inspired blacks throughout the South to hold peaceful sit-ins and other protests against segregation.

A visit to India in 1959 gave King a long-awaited opportunity to study Gandhi’s techniques of nonviolent protest. In 1960 King became co-pastor of his father’s church in Atlanta. The next year he led a “nonviolent army” to protest discrimination in Albany, Georgia.

“Letter from Birmingham Jail”

King was jailed in 1963 during a successful campaign to achieve the desegregation of many public facilities in Birmingham, Alabama. In a moving appeal, known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he replied to several white clergymen who felt that his efforts were ill timed. King argued that Asian and African countries were fast achieving political independence while “we still creep at a horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.” In the letter, he spelled out his philosophy of nonviolence:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

March on Washington

AP

Near the end of the Birmingham campaign, King joined other civil rights leaders in organizing the historic March on Washington. More than 200,000 people participated in the demonstration, which took place on August 28, 1963. They gathered peaceably near the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C., to demand equal justice for all citizens under the law. Prominent civil rights leaders made speeches, and most memorable was King’s. The crowd was uplifted by his now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In it, he expressed his faith that all men, someday, would be brothers. He linked African Americans’ hopes for equal rights with traditional American political values. He said that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution comprised “a promissory note” guaranteeing all Americans “the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

One of the aims of the March on Washington was to show and inspire support for major civil rights legislation being considered in Congress. As King had hoped, the march had a strong effect on national opinion and resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act outlawed many kinds of discrimination, including in publicly owned facilities and in employment. Later in 1964 King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize to that date. He regarded it not only as a personal honor but also as an international tribute to the nonviolent civil rights movement.

Final Years

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski

In 1965 King led a drive to register black voters in Selma, Alabama. The drive met with violent resistance. In protest of this treatment, thousands of demonstrators conducted a five-day march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery.

King was disappointed that the progress of civil rights in the South had not been matched by improvements in the lives of Northern blacks. In response to the riots in poverty-stricken black urban neighborhoods in 1965, he was determined to focus the country’s attention on the living conditions of blacks in Northern cities. In 1966 he established a headquarters in a Chicago, Illinois, slum apartment. From this base he organized protests against the city’s discrimination in housing and employment.

King combined his civil rights campaigns with a strong stand against the Vietnam War. He believed that the money and effort spent on war could be used to combat poverty and discrimination. He felt that he would be a hypocrite if he protested racial violence without also condemning the violence of war. Militant black leaders began to attack his appeals for nonviolence. They accused him of being influenced too much by whites. Government officials criticized his stand on Vietnam. Some black leaders felt that King’s statements against war diverted public attention from civil rights.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 04301u)

King inspired and planned the Poor People’s Campaign, a march on Washington, D.C., in 1968 to dramatize the relationship of poverty to urban violence. But he did not live to take part in it. Early in 1968 he traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a strike of poorly paid sanitation workers. There, on April 4, he was assassinated by a sniper, James Earl Ray. King’s death shocked the country and precipitated rioting by blacks in many cities. He was buried in Atlanta under a monument inscribed with the final words of his “I Have a Dream” address. Taken from an old slave song, the inscription read: “Free at Last,/ Free at Last,/ Thank God Almighty,/ I’m Free at Last.”

King’s brief career greatly advanced the cause of civil rights in the United States. His efforts spurred the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His energetic personality and persuasive oratory helped unite many blacks in a search for peaceful solutions to racial oppression. Although King’s views were challenged by blacks who had lost faith in nonviolence, his belief in the power of nonviolent protest remained strong. His writings include Stride Toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story (1958); Strength to Love (1963); Why We Can’t Wait (1964); and Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967).

Want to see it in action?

Start a free trial

E-mail

To

From

Sender NamePlease enter your name.

Sender EmailPlease enter a valid email address.

Translate this page

Choose a language from the menu above to view a computer-translated version of this page. Please note: Text within images is not translated, some features may not work properly after translation, and the translation may not accurately convey the intended meaning. Britannica does not review the converted text.

After translating an article, all tools except font up/font down will be disabled. To re-enable the tools or to convert back to English, click "view original" on the Google Translate toolbar.